


Convergence

by mortalitasi



Series: into the forest [5]
Category: Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: Adventure, F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 15:07:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2196414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Blackmarsh is probably not the best place to have a romantic revelation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Convergence

“Sodding swamp…! Reeds and diddly-doos and… argh.”

Nathaniel hears Lyna give a barely-audible sigh.

“It’s a marsh, Oghren, and we’re not even  _there_  yet.”

The dwarf snorts. “Marsh, shmarsh – whatever it is, it’s all out to get us.”

Nathaniel grits his teeth when the mage pipes up. “I’d want to hit the short, loud, hairy thing if I were a tree, too.”

A sharp, rustling smacking sound and the dismayed cry that follows it tells Nathaniel that the mage has been slapped squarely in the face with one of the many wickedly dry leafless branches that stretch endlessly on the sides of the path.

Oghren’s laughter is so thunderous that it rattles his armor and also makes his eardrums reverberate mercilessly for good measure. He simply clenches his bow tighter and keeps his pace steady. Lyna is in his sights, just a ways ahead, stepping lightly and evenly as she treads a path she’s never seen before with what seems to be confidence. She has been working tirelessly for the past weeks, and he can see it in her face that she has not fully recovered from the encounter with the Architect.

As he thinks about cages and talking darkspawn, she stops for a moment, looks down at her feet as though to reassure herself of where she’s going, and then moves steadily on.

She’s eerily quiet, as always, but her new set of Blackblade armor makes her even more so. In his experience with leathers, they are almost impossible to keep silent in. They creak at the worst of times – but the Blackblade set doesn’t seem to have much of this problem; and besides that fact, it is very flattering indeed. Black becomes his commander (his rather short, elven, very oddly pretty commander), he notices, and then realizes just exactly what he is thinking about and stops himself, eyes wide. He coughs a bit to clear his mind as much as his throat and continues to walk.

“I bet you felt that, didnja, sparklefingers?”

“Oh, stuff it.”

Lyna looks over her shoulder, gaze sharp. “Quiet, unless you’d like to announce to whatever else is in these hills that we’re here.”

Mage and dwarf fall into stony silence, and Nathaniel is glad for it.

The air around them is close. He knows that Blackmarsh is at the end of this narrow path, overshadowed by jagged, toothy cliffs of dark rock. Everything here smells of wet, and of dead leaves and decaying wood. It unsettles Lyna, if the stiff set of her shoulders is anything to go by.

She steps on a particularly dry path of earth that all but crumbles beneath her foot and her right ear twitches at the sound. She reaches for one of the daggers on her back, and it crackles softly with electricity at her touch, blue runes coming to life under her fingers. It unsheathes with a rasp of metal on leather, and then she turns to them.

“There are animals up ahead,” she says, rolling her shoulder. She closes her eyes for a brief moment, as though she is listening for something no one else can hear. When she opens them again, the tainted glow is still lingering in them, a ring of pale light circling her pupils. It fades slowly as she pauses. When she speaks again it’s hesitant, as though she’s remembering how to handle words. “And blighted creatures. I don’t know how many. They’re too spread out for me to sense properly.”

Their entrance into the Blackmarsh is not at all quiet. A dead ox lies only yards away from a rotten signpost, some thin, raggedy wolves feasting on its carcass. The beasts look up at them when the enter the clearing, and the largest one gnawing on the entrails of the ox bares its teeth in a scarlet-stained snarl, its breath misting in the humid, cold air.

Nathaniel watches the hackles of its packmates rise as Lyna stares the leader down, hands clenched around her daggers. The crusted foam around the wolves’ mouths tells Nathaniel that these animals are either ill or starving. Neither bodes well.

The Warden-Commander moves at the same time the pack leader does: it lunges for her and she sidesteps it neatly, dealing the wolf a vicious kick to the skull when it tries to snap at her elbows as it turns in the mud, soil gathering around its paws. It circles her for a moment and then the tension builds in its hind legs and it leaps upward, jaws open and slavering. She finishes the short fight when her blue-runed dagger slides into the upper portion of the wolf’s jaw, clearing its skull and peaking between its two ears with a red edge. Lightning sparks around the wolf’s twitching corpse, setting its fur upright.

She pulls the dagger free with a horrendous sucking-crack sound and turns, completely disregarding her group’s state of apprehension. Nathaniel already has an arrow in hand and nocked – he has only to draw the string and release.

He can hear the hum of magic from behind him. Anders has no doubt prepared himself. Oghren’s readiness is not so subtle; the color has risen in the dwarf’s cheeks and his stance is openly aggressive, battleaxe clenched in two heavily-gauntleted hands.

Their predicament is solved when Lyna takes another step and the pack of emaciated wolves scatters at her approach. They disappear amongst the hollow reeds and the marshy water, vanishing into the mist that seems to surround this accursed place and hem it in.

“Cowards,” Oghren growls, letting the tip of his battleaxe skim the upturned soil. “That’s right, run off with your tails between your legs.” He snorts derisively and straightens.

Lyna does not sheathe her weapons, and instead moves carefully to scan the face of the wall of fog that wreathes the Blackmarsh. Her voice is only a small wisp of sound in the oppressive stillness. “We’ll be getting our fight by the time the day is out. No need to worry about that.” The end of her short ponytail rasps against the collar of her armor as she turns to look at them. “Stay close.”

And they proceed into the fog, Nathaniel and Anders at the back with Lyna taking up the front and Oghren in the middle. Nathaniel can hear the dwarf grumbling something about a flask under his breath as they continue onward, crushing dry weed and grass underfoot. A shape becomes evident in the gloom – tall, dark, and aged; it is an iron gate, creaking and rusted in place from misuse and the moisture of the marsh, and Lyna wrinkles her nose at it.

Beyond the gate are what seem to be the remains of a village: shells of houses, debris littered across the ground, half-rotted and forgotten. The air smells of damp wood and must. A dark shadow hangs over the place, like the pall of death over a suffering man’s bed. Nathaniel feels the first signs of unease prickle at his nape.

“Well,” Anders says, rubbing his hands together, “this is a cheery sort of place, isn’t it?”

“Entirely,” Lyna replies, her eyes narrowing.

The hand Nathaniel has at his bowstring tenses. “Cheery enough to have a welcoming party, it seems. Commander…”

She nods. “I can only see two by the first house, but I can sense others.”

“I can take ‘em,” Oghren says, tightening his grip on the battleaxe whose blade is twice the size of Nathaniel’s head. His teeth are a flash of (surprising) white behind the shock of red of his beard. “They’d better not run this time.”

Lyna looks to her side, estimating the time she will have to do what she wants. “I do not think running is an option, Oghren.”

“Good!”

“Is that joy I hear in your voice?” Anders asks as he takes his staff from his back, the gleam of its lacquered wood peculiar and almost supernatural in the dim light.

Oghren gives a savage grin, hefting his axe. “Don’t come near me while this baby’s swinging, or my  _joy_ will get all over you.”

“…Ugh.”

Nathaniel rolls his eyes and aims carefully at one of the blurry silhouettes lurking by the shape of the burned-out house closest to the gate. He can see where the legs join to the hips, and the dragging long arms, the hunching back and the smallish head. What manner of creature is this? It looks almost… lupine, but it walks on two legs. It is barrel-chested and broad of shoulder. He can only hope it dies as quickly as anything else from an arrow to the head.

The Howe bow bends easily in his grasp, and he feels the familiar strain building in the string and his upper arm. In his peripheral vision, he sees Lyna shake out her legs and turn her daggers over in her hands, and then she nods.

The bowstring snaps back as the arrow and it dives away into the shadow, its fletching a streak of white.

There’s a quiet thump as the corpse of whatever it is the arrow hit crumples, and then rising over the misty waters, a bone-chilling keening wail – he cannot tell whether it is the cry of man or beast.

“Ah,” Lyna says, almost smiling. “Werewolves.”

–

They are difficult to fight, these hybrids of human and wolf. They’re fast on their feet and faster with their hands, all teeth and claws and snapping jaws. They stink to high heaven, too, and though Nathaniel has spent a good part of his life trudging through the unforgiving landscapes of the Free Marches, he has to admit that the smell of dead werewolf is one thing he hopes he will never have to contend with again. It’s not going to get out of his leathers with one wash, of that he is sure.

Anders is somewhere over by the last corpse, poking at the wolf-man’s ragged remainders of pants with his staff and trying to look through the pockets without having to touch anything. Prissy. Oghren is… Nathaniel doesn’t know where Oghren is. Probably cleaning his axe.

He doesn’t realize he’s been cut until the commander steps into the space beside him, her eyes watching him carefully. He’s aware he needs to say something – that he should probably say something – but nothing is coming to mind. All he can focus on is the soft fall of her fringe against her tattooed forehead and the slope of her pointed ears underneath the curl of her ponytail. That looks… almost lovely.

“You’re hurt,” Lyna says curtly, and he’s snapped out of his observations when she reaches for a pouch at her hip. She digs out a small brown cylinder and he has no idea what is until she pops off the cork and reveals a yellowish cream clinging to cylinder’s insides. He has no time to protest before she takes a small rag out of her pouch and wipes her fingers on it before dipping them into the cream and approaching him.

“Best not to let it get infected,” she tells him, giving no warning before she spreads the cool salve on the topmost curve of his left cheekbone. It doesn’t even sting. “I have more need of wardens than wolves.”

Nathaniel has to say something before the heat travels from his throat to his face. “My father used to tell me stories about the Blackmarsh when I was young,” he blurts, making Lyna tilt her head at him questioningly.

Marvelous. His father. Not like he’s ever talked about  _that_  before. Quick, keep going, before she has time to respond.

“He said evil magic killed everyone here. This was just before the rebellion – a great mystery, at the time.”

Safe. Relatively.

The commander wipes her hands on the little rag again before putting it and the cylinder away and buttoning the little pouch shut. “Your father told you  _stories_?” she says, and the question puts him back on track.

“This was a long time ago,” he reminds her. “He was a regular father once, you know.”

Her expression becomes distant, and he knows it is because she cannot reconcile the image of Rendon Howe she has with the idea of him being something other than a murdering traitor. Nathaniel hears it was Adrian who struck the final blow – what a thing to return home to. A country in ruins, a monarchy broken, a family dead and scattered; and Father slain by his own childhood companion’s hand. He still hasn’t managed to wrap his mind around the entirety of knowing it was little Cousland who killed Father: the girl whose hair he used to pull and who played with him in the mud of Highever’s fertile soil.

“They never found out what happened here. Once the monsters appeared, the marsh was abandoned.” He turns on his heel and looks at the castle in the distance, rising out of the gloom. “I used to dream of coming to the Blackmarsh and setting things right,” he says, and then half-scoffs, half-laughs. “Little boy dreams.”

The commander just smiles at him suddenly then, bright and nearly loving. How the way she’s looked at him has changed since they first met. It frightens and delights him, in part.

“You’re doing it right now, aren’t you?” Lyna says, ears twitching the way they always do when she’s interested.

“If someone had told me I’d end up here, I would have laughed at them. But times change,” Nathaniel reflects. “When I was in Kirkwall, I thought I would return to Ferelden to take command of my father’s garrison. Now here I am, a Grey Warden, and fighting both darkspawn and demons. Interesting.”

Better than talking about Father, he decides, as her smile grows wider.

“Stick around,” she advises and starts moving forward. “This happens all the time.”

He follows her, and when they’re shoulder-to-shoulder he’s struck by how short she is – again. “And the fun never ends, I suppose? Good to know.” Her unsure shrug makes him chuckle. “Anyway, the haunted marsh awaits.”

The Warden-Commander nods, smoothing the hair away from her face.

“That it does.”


End file.
